Cleveland will make a bid to host the 2014 Gay Games

Cleveland will vie to host the 2014 Gay Games, a sporting event with a global audience, and try to impress a lucrative demographic group that maybe knows little about Northeast Ohio.

Promoters of the city's bid will fly to South Africa next week, where the Federation of Gay Games is holding its annual meeting, and begin to sell Cleveland as a diverse, tolerant city with good athletic venues.

Civic leaders stepped forward Wednesday to embrace the idea at a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Cleveland-Arcade.

The Euclid Corridor transit project will be finished, he said, new businesses will have opened on the marquee avenue, and the city should be ready to host games that drew 11,500 participants and tens of thousands of spectators to Chicago in 2006.

"It's going to be a wonderful greeting environment for the athletes if we can manage to land this competition," Silliman said.

The quadrennial games were founded in San Francisco in 1982 by Olympic decathlete Tom Waddell. They will unfold in Cologne, Germany, in 2010.

Cleveland's bid is being led by Brian Tavolier and W. Douglas Anderson, organizers of North Coast Athletics Volleyball, a local 24-team league widely known in the gay community.

Both men have helped to organize past Cleveland Pride parades, which celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

They recently formed the Cleveland Synergy Foundation to lead the campaign for Gay Games IX. The name echoes one of the game's primary goals, to create ties between the gay and mainstream communities.

Wednesday's news conference illustrated some early synergy. It drew representatives of City Hall, the convention and visitors bureau and the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission.

"Cleveland is a perfect city to host these games," said Douglas, a competitive volleyball player who retired to Cleveland from San Francisco. "We have a very progressive city government. And we have wonderful, diverse people to host the world here."

Other qualities in the city's favor, he said, include a walkable downtown, good public transportation, inexpensive hotels and lots of practice hosting similar-sized athletic events.

Cleveland hosted the NBC Gravity Games in 2002 and 2004, the International Children's Games in 2004, and the NCAA Women's Final Four and the AST Dew Tour in 2007.

The city will welcome the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 2009 and the National Senior Games in 2013.

Douglas acknowledged Cleveland lacks a reputation in the national and international gay community, but David Gilbert, president of the sports commission, said that may not be a deal breaker.

"No image is better than a bad image," Gilbert said.

Civic boosters said they welcome the chance to promote the region to a widely traveled group that enjoys higher than average levels of education and affluence.

"We see this is a springboard," said Sharon Kobayashi, vice president of Positively Cleveland. "We hope to make Cleveland a gay destination."

The foundation will make its formal pitch in March, when it will learn of the cities it is competing against, Tavolier said. He added that a site selection team will probably visit Cleveland next summer.

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